Take a a virtual tour of Bialystok with Tomasz Wisniewski, an expert in Jewish history of Podlasie region, who will guide viewers through the city space and history of Bialystok, a home to Jewish community from the mid-17th century. Join in to listen to the history of Jewish community of Bialystok: its role in the rapid development of the town in the 19th century, social and cultural life in early 20th century, and the fate of Jews during Soviet and Nazi occupation.
The tour is part of the regular “Zoom in” program of the Forum for Dialogue NGO.
Wisniewski has been working for more than 30 years to preserve the memory of the Jewish communities of Poland’s eastern borderland. He created the web site jewishbialystok.pl as an online museum of Jewish history in the region and he received the POLIN museum award in 2018.
He has written several books, including a guidebook to Jewish Bialystok and surroundings, and on his YouTube channel you can find more than 2,000 films presenting Jewish history of the region. He has documented Jewish cemeteries and runs the site bagnowka.pl, which collects data on almost 40,000 tombstones, mainly Jewish ones, and also presents other heritage information.
More than 1,000 fragments of Jewish headstones that the Communist authorities removed in the 1960s from the Jewish cemetery on Zagorska Street and used to build a railway station platform will be exhibited to the public.
Excavations have been going on for six months to recover them, and they will eventually used to create a memorial.
At 5 pm, at the Muzeum Cafe Jerozolima, there will be a presentation about the history of the cemetery.
A conversation with Yechiel Weizman on his book
Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2022)
In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust. He asks how postwar Polish society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources and anthropological field work, the book uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of Poland’s material Jewish remnants and shows how their presence became the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation. Leading the conversation with Weizman will be Monika Rice, and joining them will be Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg.
This event will be held via ZOOM Webinar.
Registration is required, register in advance here.
Since 2007, forensic archaeological investigations have revealed new evidence of the crimes undertaken at the notorious Treblinka Extermination Camp in Poland.
In this talk, Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls will outline some of the key findings of this research and discuss the ways they have inspired Holocaust survivors and their descendants based in the UK to undertake their own journeys to commemorate their loved ones.
Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls’ pioneering research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of Holocaust landscapes. She conducted the first forensic archaeological investigations at Treblinka Extermination and Labour Camps, the results of which will be presented in her forthcoming book Finding Treblinka. She is also the author of several other books including Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015), the Handbook on Missing Persons (2016) and ‘Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney (2022).
Comments are closed.